Profile

Virginie Millien: Nature's archivist

Virginie Millien, seen here with rodent specimens from her fieldwork this past summer in Schefferville, started training as a geologist before turning to paleontology. "Geology is a very male field," she laughs. "I wasn't comfortable with all the bad jokes." Owen Egan

By Neale McDevitt | As a child in the suburbs of
Paris, Virginie Millien had a passion for two things—collecting and
organization. "I had collection mania, so my bedroom was always full of rocks
and bugs," she remembers. "But for several years I had to share my room with
my little brother—what a disaster! He was so disorganized I spent most of my
time cleaning up after him."

Today, as the Redpath Museum's first curator of paleontology and zoology,
Millien has found the perfect outlet for her early preoccupations, overseeing
the vast collection of almost 300,000 plants, animals and minerals. And no
brother in sight.

Few people have Millien's intimate knowledge of the museum's extensive
holdings. Since being named to her current position a year ago, Millien has
spent most of her time combing the Redpath's subterranean storage area doing
a complete inventory of natural history specimens—the first time in the
museum's history such a task has ever been undertaken. In the past,
professors would act as curators of the specimens that fell under their
particular area of interest, but no one was responsible for the collection as
a whole.

More than just an exercise in bookkeeping, Millien's year-long labour has
shed new light onto parts of the collection that have lived in the shadows
for years. "We discovered him last week—a Carolina parakeet," she says,
pointing to a small colourful bird mounted under glass in her office. "When
he first came to the museum, he was probably just another mount of a bird
native to North America. But now this type of bird is extinct, which makes
him very important. It gives us a real sense of why museums matter. They are
nature's archives." Having spent years anonymously tucked away amid a flock
of other, less rare, parrots, this Carolina parakeet will soon take a perch
of prominence on the museum floor.

Millien uses the word "archive" where others might say "repository" because
for her the museum is not just a holding tank for fossils and glass-eyed
grizzly bears. The Redpath is a huge scientific tool. "This is not just a
collection of curiosities, as it once was," she says. "Now we're here to
provide specimens for research—and that is my priority. For example, I get
requests all the time for whiskers from my mice [for DNA research]."

Ah, Millien's mice. This past summer, her fieldwork saw her collecting rodent
specimens in northern and southern Quebec to compare the variances in
population and morphology between the geographic groups. Despite a rude
introduction to Schefferville's voracious black flies ("they absolutely
terrorized me"), Millien was invigorated by her fieldwork—so much so that she
keeps dozens of rodent "study skins" (specimens mounted for scientific
purposes) in a large filing cabinet on top of her desk. "Want to see them?"
she asks, jumping up to pull out a tray resplendent with the tiny corpses of
several dozen specimens.

When asked how a little girl from one of the world's great cosmopolitan
centres developed her love of natural sciences, Millien smiles. "Maybe
Jacques Cousteau—I never missed a program. But it didn't come from my
parents, that's for sure. They can't tell a bird from a mouse."

Increasingly, Millien is enamoured with igniting in others that same spark of
discovery that she felt as a child. While she acknowledges that she is a
"behind-the-scenes person" at the Redpath, Millien revels in the museum's
public face. "Every day, we hear kids saying 'Ah, dinosaurs!' It's great
because we're helping another generation of kids learn to love science."

Millien has been especially inspired by working with McGill students as they
assist her in the field and in the museum taking inventory. In addition to
her ongoing love affair with all things collectable, Millien's experience
with students this past year has inspired her to begin working toward
becoming a professor, something of a departure for a person who so loves the
solitary nature of her work. "I was always on the path toward doing my own
research," she says. "But our students are really amazing because their
enthusiasm makes me aware of why I am here and why I do this. In many ways,
they remind me of myself when I was younger."